museumuesum

Walker Evans

License Photo Studio, New York, 1934

Gelatin silver print, 7 3/16 x 6 in. (18.3 x 15.2 cm)

This photograph displays Walker Evans’ increasingly assured ability to construct meaning out of the juxtaposition of pictorial elements. Here they extend from the hands pointing to the doorway, to the crazy quilt of signs papered across the building’s facade, to graffiti scrawled among the signs. Many of Evans’ most sophisticated photographs from the period have a rebuslike quality, disclosing previously unnoticed connections in the world. Evans was drawn to the decaying quarters of New York during the Depression—especially to buildings along the waterfront and the Bowery that exhibited, like Paul Strand’s blind peddler (33.43.334), a “battered nobility.”